Hi, my name is Kimberly Marie Kimble | an update

Hi, my name is Kimberly.

Queer, artist, photographer, birthworker & parent.

Originally from a small town in Northern Michigan, I have been calling Oregon my home for the past 14 years!

My family of five moved from the suburbs to downtown Portland and have been experiencing "art loft" living for the past 2.5 years.

Maybe you already know me. Maybe not.

Check out the ABOUT ME section to learn more.

Over the last four years, I have gone through quite the transformation.

Having thrown my heart and energy into building up my birth photography business Rushes & Waves in 2019, I found myself really lost when the pandemic became reality in 2020. I went through the stages of grief not knowing when I might ever be able to enter the birth space again. I had wrapped my business identity up in everything related to birth. The period of forced reflection would cause me to accept the fact that I may be done with birth for good.

With intention, I decided to step back from pursuing birth indefinitely, taking only a few clients the last couple of years.

In the midst of my grief and the uncertainty of the pandemic, I found myself drawn to action after the death of George Floyd and dedicated a lot of time to being a body at protests, documenting what I saw.

What I saw radically changed me.

Over the course of several months, I would witness so much police violence in response to protests about police violence that I found myself dealing with C-PTSD and no choice but to dismantle my already fragile belief system and everything I thought I knew.

In October of 2020, my sister was tragically murdered in a domestic violence incident that would radically change me in so many other ways.

Throwing myself into the grieving process without haste, I learned so much about myself and my relationship with death. With the complexity and layering of so many different kinds of unfolding, it was inevitable that I was going to come out of all of this a changed human with a changed perspective. I have a new appreciation for grief and the grieving process and have started studying what it means to be a death worker.

In my grief, I turned to nature and began to consume as much of it as I could.

After reclaiming a short lived sense of inner stability, in 2021, my family experienced a pandemic related housing displacement and we packed up and moved from the suburbs to downtown Portland, Oregon.

We have now been here for 2.5 years.

Recalibrating after such a huge transition took a while.

In order to feel more connected to the world around me, I joined an effort to start a tenants union in the artist community we live in. This would somehow eventually lead to me getting involved in an effort to make Old Town Chinatown an outdoor art museum.

Documenting the efforts behind OPAM has led to opportunities to expand my portrait & branding portfolio. And provided an avenue to trying new things. I particpated in several gallery shows as a photographer.

And was given the opportunity to create an immersive art installation that acted as a grief portal of sorts.

It's impossible to articulate the thousand other things I've gone through and experienced in the last few years.

So much has changed. I know I'm not alone.

So many of us are relying on a system that is crumbling, in a world not built for us. Dealing with financial insecurity, housing & food instability. Trying to raise kids in a world that feels quite backwards. Trying to build community in an individualistic society.



Being a human is exhausting.

Because of all of this, sometimes I struggle with whether I should share my art at all.

LATELY...

I have been dreaming up a new website that could be a "home" for the entire body of my work.

I have been building a photojournalism portfolio and nature portfolio that had no real place to live. Because I was branded as a birth photographer, any time I shot a session outside of that realm, I struggled to know where to share it. I also dabble in all sorts of different photography sessions and other creative work. I was really boxing myself in before.

Rushes & Waves still feels like an appropriate place for birth and family photography and birth work. And I'm excited to continue that work!

I decided to rebrand myself as a documentary photographer because I'm interested in telling all kinds of stories.

"HOME"

Wanting to evoke a feeling of nostalgia with my new website, I decided to create an image to live on the home page that would also symbolically tell my story.

Several objects laid upon a vintage "Photo Album" including,

a polaroid selife of me as a teenager & recent instant photo of me w/my camera,

a vintage postcard with a deer, paying homage to my Michigan roots,

one of my first cameras, "borrowed" from my highschool,

a mushroom to represent Oregon,

a crow feather representing both my partner & living downtown,

three stones, gathered on the Oregon coast, to represent my three kids,

a photo of candles, taken outside the Occupy ICE camp in 2018, to symbolize finding my "spirituality" in protest after finally leaving the church behind

and a sunflower because they are my favorite

and because they were my sister's favorite.

SO WHAT'S NEXT?

I am...

booking maternity, birth, newborn, family, portrait and brand photography sessions!

working on my THW doula certification and looking for more birth work, looking forward to reconnecting with the birth scene & working on a few birth related projects

out in the streets shooting the Free Palestine movement in PDX

working on some nature photography products and other creative print products that I'm excited to show you soon

doing lots of other random creative things while also trying to stay alive!

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